1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates to methods and systems supporting computing and data processing systems. More particularly, the disclosure relates to a user interface framework for viewing large scale graphs.
2. Related Art
In the last few years we have seen rapid growth in online applications such as social networks and web search and navigation interfaces like tag clouds. Visualizing and navigating through large networks of information like networks of social connections or networks of related content are becoming increasingly popular. While the need for such applications is increasing, complexity and scale of the underlying data pose challenges to building facilitating technologies.
Graph based information visualization technologies have proven indispensable tools for making sense of complex data by representing the data in the form of nodes and edges where nodes represent some form of entity and edges represent relationships between the nodes. For example, for a search interface, group the results into clusters and providing an interface to visualize that as a graph and navigate through the labels of the nodes which represent clusters would be a useful interface. In fact, we use this as a running use case throughout this paper.
Unfortunately there are a number of challenges to visualizing and navigating through large graphs of data. Research in graph visualization has so far been mainly focused on graph drawing and layout algorithms.
Real time rendering and navigation of large-scale graphs on a thin-client may be a challenge. As the graph becomes dense and the relative position of a node with another node in the graph changes continuously as the layout is updated based on the user selection of the node. This makes it confusing for the users and poses a user-experience challenge. Another complexity of the web based graph visualization tools is that for large scale adoption, the rendering and drawing of the graph has to be done on the browser without downloading external plug-ins, applets or software.
Thus, a computer-implemented system and method providing a user interface framework for viewing large scale graphs are needed.